Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 180, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 July 1915 — ENORMOUS LOSS BY EROSION [ARTICLE]

ENORMOUS LOSS BY EROSION

Missouri River In Particular Carries Large Quantity of Land to the Sea Every Year. Tijp Missouri is the muddiest river in the Mississippi valley; it carries more silt than any other large river in the United States except possibly the Rio Grande and the Colorado. For every square mile of country drained it carries downstream 381 tons of dissolved and suspended matter each year. In other words, the river gathers annually from the country that It drains more than 123,000,000 tons of silt and soluble matter, some of which it distributes over the flood plains below to form productive agricultural lands but most of which finds its way at last to the Gulf of Mexico. It is by means of data of this kind that geologists compute the rate at which the lands are being eroded away. It has been shown that the Mississippi river is lowering the surface of the land drained by it at the rate of 1 foot in 6,036 years. Th« surface of the United States as a whole is now being worn down at the rate of 1 foot in 9,120 years. It has been estimated that if this erosive action of the streams of the United States could have been concentrated on the Isthmus of Panama it would have dug in 73 days the canal which was completed, after 10 years’ work, with the most powerful appliances yet devised by man.—Overland Guidebook, Bulletin 612, U. S. Geological Survey.